Synopses & Reviews
Designed to appeal to students of history and foodies alike, American Appetites, the first book in the University of Arkansas Presss new Food and Foodways series, brings together compelling firsthand testimony describing the nations collective eating habits throughout time. Beginning with Native American folktales that document foundational food habits and ending with contemporary discussions about how to obtain adequate, healthful, and ethical food, this volume reveals that the quest for food has always been about more than physical nourishment, demonstrating changing attitudes about issues ranging from patriotism and gender to technology and race. Readers will experience vicariously hunger and satiation, culinary pleasure and gustatory distress from perspectives as varied as those of enslaved Africans, nineteenth-century socialites, battle-weary soldiers, impoverished immigrants, and prominent politicians. Regardless of their status or the peculiarities of their historical moment, the Americans whose stories are captured here reveal that U.S. history cannot be understood apart from an examination of what drives and what feeds the American appetite.
Review
This invaluable collection of documents shows the crucial place of food in American history. The editors have dug deep into the larder for these readings, which cross lines of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to show how farmers and cooks helped to build the nation.”
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, author of Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food
Review
A fine collection of documents spanning the American food experience. From Native American explanations of the three sisters crops to Gilded Age menus to the angsts of plenty in the twenty-first century, readers will find a banquet of firsthand accounts detailing the wide-ranging meanings that Americans have given their food over four centuries. Students and food history fans alike will find the essays fascinating and rich.”
Rebecca Sharpless, author of Cooking in Other Womens Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 18651960
Review
A seminal resource on Americas rich and complex food economy.”
Psyche Williams-Forson
Review
By giving divergent voices equal weight, Wallach and Swindall invite us to wrestle with the contradictions in food and culturehow we can have so much and yet suffer such hunger; how reconciliation and segregation both find their most powerful metaphors at the table; and how race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and age both obscure and draw forth food choices in our individual and collective lives.”
Elizabeth Engelhardt, author of A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food
Synopsis
The stories captured in this compelling new collection reveal that US history cannot be understood apart from our relationship to food. Beginning with Native American folktales that document foundational food habits and ending with contemporary discussions about how to obtain adequate, healthful, and ethical nutrition, this volume shows that the quest for food has always been about more than physical nourishment, demonstrating how changing attitudes about issues ranging from patriotism and gender to technology and race all affect how we set our table and satisfy our appetites.
About the Author
Jennifer Jensen Wallach is associate professor of history at the University of North Texas and the author or editor of four books, including
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture.
Lindsey R. Swindall is visiting assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University and the author of three books including The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 19371955.